One driving factor in the browser wars I didn’t mention yet is LOAD SPEED – how fast does a page load.
All of the browsers have made major strides in the last year or two in speeding up how fast websites load. They’ve made this a priority over many other things they could have been working on.
Why?
People don’t like having to wait.
So one reason people switch browsers or download a newer version is to speed up their browsing experience.
At this time all the major browsers run much faster, but it brings up a key point on the other end of the equation:
The quality of your website hosting.
There are five big factors on how fast a page loads:
1. The speed of your Internet connection (the ACTUAL not theoretical speed. Cable is a party line, the more people on your “loop” are doing things, the more your connection slows down).
2. The browser.
3. Have you visited this same site recently (because browsers save portions of the page in their temporary storage, called a cache, to speed up load time).
4. The page weight – meaning how many Kilobytes or Megabytes have to be loaded for that page, as well as some other factors.
5. THE QUALITY OF THE HOSTING
This last is a huge hidden factor that can just completely kill the effectiveness of your website.
There’s a reason cheap hosting plans are cheap. The company typically loads up their servers with hundreds or even thousands of websites, all competing for server resources.
You know what happens when you try and run too many programs all at once on your computer? Same thing.
We have seen a website where #1-4 above were no issue at all, yet take 15 seconds to load a page.
Who is going to wait for that?